Creation/Evolution F.A.Q.

DISCLAIMER –
Below are the answers to the 20 most commonly asked questions in the realm of creation/evolution and Biblical authority.

Although other sites and sources will offer other interpretations or refutations to consider, please keep in mind who/what they place as their final authority. The answers listed above make the word of God the final authority on all matters.

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1. How do we know the creation happened in 6 literal days vs. 6 long ages?

The Hebrew word for “day” is “YOM”. Yom can mean a literal day or a long age. We have to use context clues to differentiate. Whenever Yom is used and combined with a number (first day, second day, etc.) AND the phrasing “evening, then morning” – it always means a literal 24-hour day. This is evident in Jonah in the fish for three days, how many days Joshua marched around Jericho and Jesus in the grave for three days. We don’t question those lengths of time.

God himself appears to have considered them 6 literal days in Exodus 20 as he is speaking to Moses directly during the giving of the 10 Commandments and says “for in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth” (v.11). He uses that as directive that humans should work 6 literal days and take a Sabbath day each week. There is no intra-Biblical reason to doubt the days of creation as anything other than 6 literal days.

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2. How can you have a 24-hour day before the sun is created on day four?

The sun does not dictate the length of a day. The sun dictates the length of a year. A day is calculated by one full rotation of the earth. The earth was created on day one and turned one full rotation that day (evening, then morning). Keep in mind there are parts of the earth today that have sunlight all day and night, and some parts that have no sunlight all day and all night. That doesn’t mean they don’t have days.

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3. Isn’t the opening chapters of Genesis all poetry and not meant to be read literally?

One can certainly make a case that some of the opening chapters of Genesis are written in a poetic stylization, but that makes no bearing on whether the events it depicts are truthful or not. Even if it is poetry… I can write a factual poem. One of the greatest arguments against the poetry theory is the genealogies of Genesis 4, 5, and 11: so and so begat so and so begat so and so, and on and on. That certainly is NOT poetic and all leads back to a literal Adam.

Jesus, God with us on earth, believed in a literal history in Genesis. He mentioned many Genesis characters in Genesis as actual literal people including Noah, Moses, and Abel. In Luke 11: 50-51 Jesus describes Abel’s blood as being spilt from “foundation of the world”… not billions of years later.

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4. Isn’t the Big Bang Theory compatible with the Bible?

It’s often said by Christians – “yeah, I believe in the Big Bang, God spoke and BANG it happened”. Although that is a correct statement, the scientific Big Bang Theory states that the sun and other stars existed for close to 15 billion years before the earth formed. Genesis says that the earth was formed on day 1 of creation, and the sun & stars on day 4. The order is not compatible.

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5. Isn’t the order of evolution compatible with the order of creation?

No. Evolution states that sea creatures led to land animals and then land animals led to flying creatures. According to the Genesis account birds (day 5) came before land animals (day 6). So even IF you stretch out the days of creation, it is not compatible with evolution.

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6. Why is this even important?

Having a full understanding of Biblical creation is critical to a consistent Christian worldview. It is not a make-or-break salvation issue, but it does bear weight on your personal testimony. Evolution is built on billions of years of death before Adam/Eve came on the scene. According to Romans 5:12 “sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin”. There was no death before Adam/Eve sinned. This is confirmed by the fact that everything in the garden of Eden was vegetarian (Gen. 1: 29-30) and there were no thorns on plants. If death/disease was always a part of God’s original design, then why did Christ need to come to restore us? Restore us to what? The creation and fall must have happened exactly as written in the Old Testament and confirmed in the New Testament for Jesus’s salvation to make sense.

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7. How old is the earth?

The genealogies located throughout the Bible are unbroken and give exact numbers as to spans of life and time between generations. One can add up from Adam all the way to Jesus as being about 4000 years’ time. We also know Christ was born approximately 2000 years ago. So according to the Bible the earth is about 6000 years old.

Radiometric dating takes a rock and looks at a particular isotope’s observed decay rates and extrapolates that rate through all of history to declare a starting date for that rock. There are too many assumptions at play for that date to be accurate. Take this example: you walk into a room with an hourglass pouring sand in the middle of its cycle. You want to determine how long it has been going for. You measure the rate at which the sand is going through. You extrapolate that back to determine the sand has been falling for 4.5 billion years. BUT you don’t really know if all the sand was on the top when it was originally turned over. You also don’t know if the hourglass was ever interrupted. You have assumed it has never was interrupted and that it was full when started.

According to Biblical creation we know that everything we see was created in six literal days instead of slowly over billions of years. Therefore plants, animals, humans, rocks, trees, etc. literally popped into existence mid-life cycle. According to that understanding it makes sense that scientists who have ignored this information would come up with inaccurate results in their dating methods. Radiometric dating’s decay rates are accurate in the present, but can prove nothing about the past. The claims about the past can never be verified. To verify the past you would need the word of someone who was there when it happened, the authoritative creator.

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9. How do we know the Bible is reliable?

Well of course I could write a whole book on this topic, but I will try to briefly recap my responses to the common objection:

SO OLD – Age makes no difference. Just because the evidence for the US Revolutionary War is over 200 years old does not mean it did not happen.

MISTRANSLATIONS – Actual study of the painstaking details put into translation efforts are inspiring. Scribes would destroy an entire scroll if one word was spelled wrong because they did not want future editions to be compromised.

ORIGINAL TEXTS / ERRORS – Although we do not have original texts in the author’s hand, we do have over 5000 complete or partial copies of the originals, and they all agree in amazing detail to each other. The addition of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1950s solidified these other copies.

FAIRY TALES – This is just an excuse. There is no evidence for this other than the arguer not willing to accept supernatural events. The original authors of these texts would have been considered radical and many were put to death. They would had no other motive to write then from the divine.

NO EYE-WITNESSES – Moses was an eye-witness to the events in most of the first five books of the Bible. David wrote the Psalms himself. Paul, who wrote most of the epistles, was not an eye-witness to Christ but experienced a powerful supernatural experience with God on the road to Damascus. The authors of the gospels are the individuals with which they are named, who are eye-witnesses to Christ.

CONTRADICTIONS – Although many secularists have appeared to uncover many contradictions within the pages of the Bible, and although these contradictions seem credible at first glance, they very rarely take into account the full story of the Bible and focus solely on a particular event/detail. The entire Bible is a complete succinct story foretelling the first and second comings of Jesus. Everything points to Jesus and must be taken in that context.

BIBLE BETTER THAN OTHERS – The Bible is a collection of 66 books written by over 40 authors, on 3 continents, over 1500 years, yet tells a cohesive non-contradicting prophetic story. The Bible is the only religious text that creates a non-contradicting foundation for laws of logic, uniformity of nature, and morality.

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10. What is the best proof of creation?

Although creationists do have several time clocks we can use to show that the earth is not billions of years old, and although we have things such as red blood cells in T-Rex bones, and cave-drawings of dinosaurs, and a huge geologic strata record of global catastrophe consistent with Biblical accounts – the best proof of creation is the uniformity we see in nature, the laws of logic, science, and morality.

In an evolutionary world, uniformity of nature doesn’t make sense. The funny thing is evolutionists require a uniformity of nature to make the kind of historical claims they make, yet that refutes a supposed world in a state of constant change. In an evolutionary worldview we could not trust our senses to return accurate results.

The fact that we have absolute laws of logic and science also refute an evolutionary worldview where everything came from “nothing”. If that is so, how do we have these absolute, unchanging, immaterial laws? Biblical creation is the only rational explanation for these laws.

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11. What about the fossil record?

Evolutionists claim that the geologic column that includes various strata showing fossils of animals in an ascending order of complexity is proof of evolution. The Bible teaches us that about 1500 years after creation, God destroyed the earth through a catastrophic worldwide flood. Creationists believe this flood is what created a good amount of the fossil record and geologic column. Creationists believe there is order in the fossils, but that doesn’t prove an order of evolution from bottom to top, but an order of burial. Smaller, less advanced animals would have been buried first, then larger and smarter animals next, with humans being the most advanced buried last. The fossil record is no problem for creationists; in fact it is great evidence for the Bible.

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12. Isn’t our DNA 95% the same as chimpanzees?

Yes. But this no more proves common decent than it proves a common creator. The similarities we share with other members of creation are great evidences for a common designer.

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13. What proof is there of the flood?

If the flood really happened, what would we expect to find? Billions of dead things laid down by sediment all over the world. What do we find … exactly that! The earth is still 2/3 water, polar ice caps, plate tectonics, etc. The proof is literally everywhere you look. The earth was forever changed after the flood. We now study a broken, fallen version of the original creation. There is no reason to accept secular scientists’ naturalistic-only interpretations of evidence when they are studying a broken version of the world.

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14. What about dinosaurs?

Dinosaurs were created on day six of creation alongside all other land animals and man. The dinosaurs were more than likely on Noah’s Ark because we believe they are mentioned later in Job. Dinosaurs, like many other large animals could fit onto the Ark with no problem because they would have been mostly juvenile.

We do not find the word “dinosaur” in the Bible because it was not invented until the mid-1800’s, almost 230 years after the English translation of the Bible. In Job chapter 40 God described “behemoth” which he created “alongside man” with bones like brass and “tail like a cedar”. There is no animal living today that has a tail the size of a cedar tree other than a sauropod dinosaur.

Many creationists believe that ancient dragon legends all over the world confirm that men have seen “large lizards”. Cave drawings and ancient architecture resembling dinosaurs confirm this theory. The dinosaurs either went extinct like any other animal or were hunted in the style of dragon legends.

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15. Why would God deceive us with so much wrong evidence?

Evidence does not speak for itself. A dinosaur bone is not dug up with a tag reading “65 million years”. A scientist decides the bone is 65 million years old based on assumption-filled dating methods and an unproveable interpretation of the geologic column. The secular dating methods and interpretation of the fossil record/geologic column has ignored the evidence put forth in the Bible. God did not deceive us. He told us all about how He did it. We ignored it in our research.

Take this example: if I went out to study the Civil War, but only studied the rocks and bones left behind, I would get the picture wrong. My conclusions would seem correct based on my starting conditions, but we all know they would be incomplete. When it’s a historical issue we are dealing with, it is best to also consult what was written down about that time period. What better history book do we have than the Bible!

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16. How do you account for the variation amongst animals and humans?

Creationists have no issue with natural selection. Natural Selection is the explanation of how mutations work to create variations amongst different species. Evolutionist use natural selection to show that evolution is true. Natural selection is proven; it is observed here in the present. But natural selection actually confirms Biblical creations. What we observe is that although there is great variation amongst species (many types of dogs, cats, etc.) – cats still reproduce into cats, dogs reproduce into dogs. That is not changing.

Evolutionists will often use examples of bacteria or antibiotic reactions to show evolution is true, but all this does is confirm God’s coding into the genetic information for variance and adaptation. At the end of the day, all the variations are still bacteria. In fact natural selection by definition is a selective process, not a creative process.

Human variation came about partly from the confusion of languages at the tower of Babel. After the flood God instructed the people to spread out and fill the whole earth. The people disobeyed and stayed all together. God confused the languages forcing the people into people groups which then naturally spread out across the world. Natural selection then adapted skin colors and attributes to those various parts of the world.

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17. Where did Cain get his wife?

If Adam and Eve were the very first two people on the planet, where did their son Cain get a wife? Well, the Bible does state that Adam and Eve had many sons AND daughters. Cain would have had to marry a sister or even possibly a niece. God did not make a declaration regarding marrying close relatives until the law was given to Moses close to 2000 years later.

This would make sense in a Biblical creation worldview. In the beginning we were created with a perfect genetic code. After sin entered the world, and death initiated that code began to degenerate through mutations. In the beginning our genetic code would have been more complete and closer to perfection. Although mutations do rarely allow a beneficial attribute, they all permanently lose genetic information. This is the basis for the theory of de-evolution, or in other words – the opposite of evolution. That is why Cain could marry a close relative and the offspring is fine, but that would not work today after thousands of years of de-evolution.

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18. Is creation actual science?

The study of origins is different than mainstream science. Whether you are talking evolution or creation, those things are in the past – they can no longer be observed and tested today. What we have now are the left behind evidence to interpret. Evolution interprets the evidence as billions of years and common descent. Creation interprets the evidence as thousands of years and common design.

As already pointed out – creationists and evolutionists have the same evidences, different interpretations. Many people will point out that creationists base their interpretations on theology instead of nature. That is true. But that alone doesn’t make our interpretations any less viable. Both sides need to be honest and admit that this is more of a historical issue than a scientific one. Neither side of the debate can ever be proven.

Creation and evolution are examples of historical science. In contrast, observational science is the most recognize type of science. Observational science we observe and test here in the present. Historical science will always be interpreted through your preexisting worldview biases – whether secular or spiritual, and can never be proven scientifically.

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19. Doesn’t the creation account of Genesis 2 contradict Genesis 1?

A big debate among those who take the Bible and Creation literally and those who do not has risen among an apparent contradiction between the creation account in Genesis 1 and a supposedly different order in the account of Genesis 2. This is a common misinterpretation. Genesis 1 is an account of the full week of creation, Genesis 2 a closer look at day six.

The big debate centers around Gen. 2:19 that says in the KJV – “And out of the ground the Lord formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam”, the NIV states “Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground…” The argument is around the English translation of the verb ‘form’. This is a problem any translation runs into. It does not mean it is incorrect. Luckily we have over 5000 ancient manuscripts in which we can compare to, and the overall consensus is that the verb ‘form’ should be in the past tense in this sentence as it is in the NIV and as Tyndale used it (which predated the KJV). Another example of vegetation springing up at differing times is two different forms of the word in the original language.

Genesis 2 never claims to be a chronological account. It is a closer look into the details of the items already laid out in Genesis 1. There is no contradiction.

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20. How can a loving God allow so much suffering?

The age old “why do bad things happen to good people” question! First of all, we need to realize that there are NO good people. The Bible says there is “not one righteous”. Now, there WERE good people. God created Adam and Eve and declared them “very good”. This was before they decided to rebel against God and introduce sin into the world.

According to Biblical creation, God created the entire world perfectly – the only way a perfect God could. He called it all “very good”. There was no death, no suffering, no pain, and no disease. All these things began as a result of our rebellion. Now we experience pain and suffering, diseases, and ultimately death. God did not declare a world full of death and cancer “very good”. God was against death.

Our selfish desires and rebellion are to blame for why bad things happen today. Graciously, God has provided a lifeline back to his perfectly designed plan for us, and that comes through His son Jesus Christ. Still don’t understand? Let me try this example as a final wrap-up:

God is the software designer (information does not create itself). He created a perfect code (the world). He released it to beta testers (Adam/Eve). They infected the code (sin). They mass produced the infected code (reproduction). The software designer is not happy with the new version and decides to do a mass recall (flood) and only leave the purest copy of the code he could find (Noah) on the market. Eventually the users end up infecting the code again. The software designer decides that an upgrade is due (Jesus). Those that don’t accept the upgrade decide it is the original designer’s fault that the software is infected and lose all trust in Him. The designer decides to scrap the whole project (Revelation) and re-release the upgraded copies in a controlled environment (Heaven), and burn the rest! Take the upgrade.